Post 1

When you've been working in the same industry for close to twenty years, people start to believe you know what you're talking about.

And when those people start bigging you up to other people in ways you would never personally dare, you can't help but think you must be doing something right.

I'm Jon Ponting, and since 2007 I've been helping housebuilders and developers across the United Kingdom ensure their proposed designs meet Government driven energy and carbon targets.

My job title is usually along the lines of Sustainability Consultant, and to most of my friends I'm a real-life Chandler... I work with computers but nobody understands what I do despite my efforts to explain before they get bored and wander off.

To those in the know, I'm a SAP assessor who measures new housing developments to ensure they meet compliance with the mandatory targets of building regulation Approved Document Part L (in England and Wales), and Technical Handbook Section 6 (Scotland).

In my time I've also worked with SBEM and EPC modelling for non-residential buildings, Display Energy Certificates, compliance with overheating and access to daylight, and I know my way around a BREEAM assessment and what's needed for whole carbon lifecycle. After 20 years it's surprising how much stuff you pick up along the way!

The UK is about to go through monumental change as we all play our part to achieve net zero by 2050.

In construction, new building regulations, calculation procedures, certification and legal requirements are all in the pipeline. Within a few years, every newly built home will be ready for the zero-carbon revolution.

So I've somehow become one of the nation's go-to experts for predicting what's going to happen with the next version of building regulations, courtesy of the Government's Future Homes Standard policy.

This is me, without business attire.

I tend to share thoughts and opinion pieces on LinkedIn, because that's the kind of thing people like me do.

This blog is a second place for my posts, and gives me a platform to share extra content; potentially also training videos and downloadable calculators. It is also a great excuse to finally use this blog account that I bought years ago and have never seriously played with.

At the moment, the UK Government is consulting and debating about the detail of these proposed new regulations, but as things are officially confirmed, I'll be sharing that news on these pages.

When the Home Energy Model is officially published, I'll be creating posts designed to help SAP assessors get to grips with the new input requirements.

And, as MHCLG (Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government) is proposing to publish a publicly available HEM tool, I'll be providing page-by-page guidance on what information is needed to accurately build a HEM model of a dwelling.

I hope you find this blog useful. If nothing else, it gives me a chance to write down my thoughts, which until now have been scribbled into notebooks and promptly forgotten about.